A Big Nail on the Head of institutionalized "Spirituality"

Whilst writing on the Heart Sutra, I had to dig up a book on the subject. Unfortunately, the book that I needed was at the bottom of a pile of books. To lay my hands on it, I had to remove the whole of some 20 books above it and place the other books on the floor. But in the hurry, I upset the temporary pile. A book fell out. Its two sides lay on the ground with the book cover leaning obliguely against the side of another pile of books. It was open. Its pages curved out like two little wings  fluttering in the draught created by the airconditioner above or two little open arms beckoning me to look at them. Without thinking, I reached out my hands. I picked it up. I flapped its cover down. It was a book by one of my favourite writers. He is Thomas Merton. He was a Catholic monk who spent his life in a curious mix of quietism and activism. He was a Trappist monk. He belonged to the same order as those in Lantao Island who produce and sell those "Red Cross" cartoned fresh milk that we sometimes find on the dairy shelf of some local supermarkets. But he also wrote extensively on the prayerful attitude to life, the care and cultivation of our soul, our social responsibility to the secular world and on certain aspects of world politics. 

I read him a long time ago. In line with my reading habit, I have marked with a highlight marker pen, usually in green ink, various passages of the books that I find insightful. His book is filled with many pages with such highlighted lines. The name of the book is "The Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander" , an Image book published by Doubleday 1968, 1989. Out of curiosity, I read the opened pages. Once I set my eyes upon them, I could not take them off. I stood reading, my feet rooted to the ground, in front of the airconditioner, besides the speakers in my tiny sitting room. It was an excellent passage. I had certainly read it before because it was highlighted in green but it still felt as if I was reading it for the first time!  What he said there remains as valid today as it was so many years ago. I do not know if this counts as an instance of what Jung calls "serendipity" because at that moment, my mind was filled with thoughts about Buddhist spirituality. But I do know that I do not want to summarize what he said because I don't think I can do him justice. I better let him say it in his own words:

"      Many of the problems and sufferings of the spiritual life today are either fictitious or they should not have to be put up with. But because of our mentality we block the "total response" that is needed for a fully healthy and fruitufl spirituality. In fact the very idea of "spirituality" tends to be unhealthy in so far as it is divisive and itself makes total response impossible. The "spiritual" life thus becomes something lived "interiorly" and in "the spirit" (or worse still in the 'mind"--indeed in the 'imagination"). The body is left out of it, because the body is "bad" or at best, "unspiritual". But the "body" gets into the act anyway, sometimes in rather disconverting ways, especially when it has been excluded on general principles.

       So we create problems that should never arise, simply because we "believe" with our mind, but heart and body do not follow. Or else the heart and the emotions drive on in some direction of their own, with the mind in total confusion. The damnable abstractness of the "spiritual life" in this sense is ruining people, and it is also one of the chief reasons why many modern men and women cannot endure a lifetime in a monastery or a convent. All is reduced to "intentions" and "interior acts" and one is instructed to "purify one's intention" and bear the Cross mentally, while physically and psychologically one is more and more deeply involved in an overworked, unbalanced, irrational, even inhuman existence. I do not speak for myself now, my life is all right. I think of the lives led by thousands of nuns.

      The peculiar suffering of some deeply spiritual people--and it is very acute suffering indeed--is due to the fact that their mind and will reach out to God but this is not yet a total love. One's whole being has to obey God, and there is no way of it doing so when in fact one's life is involved in the exhausting and stupid external routines of academic and social life (in one case I am thinking of) or of the convent. Merely wroking out the spiritual equaiton that says, "this must be God's will" is no satisfactory answer. These people remain paralyzed, inarticulate, incapable of helping themselves. I am sure that in spite of everything they can gain something from this experience, and it can indeed be "purifying". But the glib doctrine that makes this out to be the "best way" to union with God is an affront to God as well as to man. One may have to put up with the situation out of necessity, but I refuse to believe that the spiritual life, as willed by God, is nothing better than organized masochism.

      Perhaps we ought to be a little more critical of this whole concept: "the spiritual life".

      As long as thought and prayer are not fully incarnated in an activity which supports and expresses them validly, the heart will be filled with a smothered rage, frustration, and a sense of dishonesty. When one is not able to experience this consciously, then it comes out in masochistic tribulations and even in sickness."

Merton stated in the clearest terms what is ailing modern spirituality. It is divorced from the body!  It is confined to the realm of the spirit, as if we had no bodies. It is a disembodied "spirituality". And as Merton said, it may be something worse: it may have life only in the "imagination"!  What he advocates is what he calls "a total response", one involving not only our soul, but also our body!  We need a spirituality which is fully engaged with all aspects of our life as it is in contemprary society, with personal, private, contemplative, interior aspects as well as secular, social and public aspects and one which involves and engages not only our mind, or our emotions but also the whole of our personality (physical, emotional, psychological, and social perhaps even political). In particular, we must never exclude our body in this enterprise. His ideas seem to tie in nicely with those of the great Buddha, for whom the Dharma, the Bodhi, must be a "lived" experience, and must not be restricted to merely an "intellectual " understanding! If it were not so, then our "spirituality" will be an "empty" shell, merely clever and seemingly "sagely" and apparently "profound" but ultimately "empty" noises we pronounce at talks, lectures with no "real" meaning for our actual spiritual life!